The piece has no written melody, but is rather defined by a set of chord changes that are improvised over using various modes of the major scale of each tonality. Each musician separately chose the number of bars for each of the modal passages in his solo. Davis gets credit for the song form, but Evans is credited with the opening 4-bar vamp over Cmaj7 and G9sus4, which is the opening theme to his ballad improvisation "Peace Piece". Because of the presence of this vamp, "Flamenco Sketches" is usually played as a ballad. The modes used in "Flamenco Sketches" are as follows: